Wikileaks Put Women in Turkey in Danger, for No Reason
Just days after a bloody coup attempt shook Turkey, Wikileaks dumped some 300,000 emails they chose to call “Erdogan emails.” In response, Turkey’s internet governance body swiftly blocked access to Wikileaks.
For many, blocking Wikileaks was confirmation that the emails were damaging to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the government, revealing corruption or other wrongdoing. There was a stream of articles about “censorship.” Even U.S. National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden tweeted the news of the Wikileaks block with the comment: “How to authenticate a leak.”
But Snowden couldn’t have been more wrong about an act that was irresponsible, of no public interest and of potential danger to millions of ordinary, innocent people, especially millions of women in Turkey. And yet Western media reports, ranging from Reuters to Wired, some from journalists I know and respect, made the same assumptions Snowden did. They merely reported the block as an act of censorship and reported Wikileaks’ allegations of what the emails may contain, without apparently any cursory check.
Journalists and anti-censorship activists who I am in touch with in Turkey have been combing through the leaked documents, and I am not aware of anything “newsworthy” being uncovered. According to the collective searching capacity of long-term activists and journalists in Turkey, none of the “Erdogan emails” appear to be emails actually from Erdogan or his inner circle. Nobody seems to be able to find a smoking gun exposing people in positions of power and responsibility. This doesn’t rule out something eventually emerging, but there have been several days of extensive searching.
However, this dump does include massive databases containing sensitive and private information of millions of ordinary people, including a special database of almost all adult women in Turkey.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zeynep-tufekci/wikileaks-erdogan-emails_b_11158792.html
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